Because they are so frequently decent, I’m sometimes tempted to reconcile the profession of policing with the kind of free society I dream about. After all, I have several friends and family who are police officers, and I’m loathe to let ideology darken my opinions of them as individuals. I want to believe policing is possible outside the hegemony of a state, and that these people can be meaningful participants in a stateless community.
But I never persist in that belief very long. I cannot think of any acceptable justification for the existence of law enforcement as an institution at all. The entire enterprise is abominable, root and branch. There is no escaping the conclusion that, everywhere they exist, police are mercenary occupiers serving a power hostile to the authentic human flourishing. As I intend to show, so long as our society exhibits privilege and injustice, I cannot pretend law enforcement does not prop it up in some fundamental manner.
It is the transformation of the function of policing into a profession that chiefly offends me. It’s as ridiculous as professionalizing the role of the voter in a democracy. I’m sure contractors or bureuacrats could devise a way to vote more efficiently than any of us flesh-and-blood folks can, but wouldn’t that defeat the point? It’s crucial to a democracy that everybody vote; it’s what makes it a democracy (putting aside whether such formal democratic governance is desirable).
In the same way all eligble members must vote in order for a democracy to be most legitimate and authentic, being a member of a free, self-governing, non-authoritarian community necessarily entails policing on the part of every community member. After all, more is implied by “community” than mere proximity of domiciles. Rather, communities should comprise a population unit bound by shared values, a coherent body brought together and made distinct by the identity emerging from individual lives. When you surrender using coercion as an organizing principle, what other basis is there for collectivity?
These shared values do not ensure there will never be conflict, or even that these communities will always work. They do, however, ensure that the costs, side-effects, and consequences of that community’s values will be legible to the people themselves. If you want racism in your community, well, you’ll have to do the dirty business of pushing around people yourself–no passing laws and hiring cops to do it for you. If you want to enforce unequal distribution of wealth, you can’t hire goons to keep your neighbors fenced off in squalor. Whatever problems face the community, at least the community cannot ignore them.
Professionalizing the policing of communities encourages people to promote values without fully internalizing the costs of doing so. These costs accrue not just monetarily; they are costs incurred through inconvenience, mental calcuation, averting one’s eyes, and psychological coping, through the inalienable duties of community membership, through the inability to simply ignore the reality of your fellow man. If you outsource this, you don’t just concentrate power in a class of people with obscene incentives to abuse it. You also outsource your ability to learn whether or not your community actually functions at all. And you will be hostage to the police because you’re afraid to fully accept and participate in the consequences of your way of life. Shouldn’t that tell you something about your community?
I don’t understand why anarchists of all stripes underemphasize the degree to which anarchism is necessarily incompatible with mediating institutions like the police. It seems to me that speaking only of what people can expect to get from a stateless society smacks of typical individualist myopia. Abolishing constituted authority confers the duty to regulate and manage personally, relying on everybody to step up and do their part.
You can’t hold the responsibilities of human freedom without unfiltered, direct information about the conditions under which that freedom exists. To be free in a particular context must entail an awareness of that particular context. Anarchism, sans ideology, is ultimately about being present, directly experiencing the collective reality, noticing the fluid conditions that are equally capable of frustrating and liberating us all. Any political principles following from that approach downright empirical facts.
Anarchism prefigures a world in which people go about human business in all its facets, without mediation or privilege. Self-government doesn’t merely devolve the operations of governance, such as the parliamentary or legal, to the common man. It changes the nature of what we mean by government, transforming it from a formality of institutions running parallel to society into a day-to-day individual duty, a constant creation of and reaction to society, not in spite of the people’s confluence and conviviality but as its logical product.
We find ourselves held hostage by police and their increasing demands for more intrusive, more arresting, more egregious domination because we know our communities cannot work on their own. So we put up with the arrogance, the abuse, the concentration of unaccountable power. In addition to pointing out the evil and error of this situation, anarchists must stress that it is also an abdication to the state of the very essence of our social nature. A police force tangibly represents the abandonment of community, a clue that the collective values of the population do not align with the lived reality.
A community doesn’t require guards wielding lethal force to maintain itself. It doesn’t have to protect those with more privilege, power, or wealth from those with less. The very fact that you have to constantly protect power and privilege in first place, let alone do so by hiring the goon squad, tells you whatever arrangements you wish to protect are artificial, illegitimate, and unsustainable.
If community wealth is imbalanced, of course you will have crime. If you have a subclass of people who are disrespected consistently by the others, of course you will have violence. If you refuse to engage directly with your neighbors, of course you’ll need an armed mediation squad to protect you and yours from them and theirs. And if your reaction to the messy business of human beings is to wall yourself off from them with a professional cleanup crew, mopping up the trail of blood and pain your chosen existence creates, of course it will persist. To solve a problem you must first face it.
The police don’t create injustice, inequality, suffering, poverty, and crime; those things will probably happen anywhere to some degree. All that police do is maintain the status quo that allows these things to continue and intensify, protecting business as usual from them. “Bad people” exist, but I see no evidence that the police has some sort of unique ability to identify them, so prevalent are they in the halls of power (and donut shops).
By sanitizing the problems our laws, practices, and values create for us, they make our collective dysfunction possible. We don’t need to actually respond to the damage we cause; we just pay to have it managed for us, and this default attitude enables many of the intractible, ongoing crises of modern life because the community’s fluid, adaptive nature has been denied. The police allow us to pretend this constant failure of humanity is just the way the world is, instead of what we ask them to institute as an alternative to facing it head on.
It’s like a town living behind a dam that can’t hold; every time it floods, the solution is a bigger, better, more expensive dam, instead of just moving to a place that doesn’t require a dam. Similarly, it’s as if the police manufacture the community’s need for their services, with our all too frequently enthusiastic blessing. While I criticize the individuals who choose the crappy profession of law enforcement for not self-regulating more, I’m sympathetic to their predicament to defend an indefensible and unsustainable order. There’s no way to do it but with brutal violence, ubiquitious threats, and raw, unaccountable power.
Professional police create the illusion that we can be passive consumers of government. Law enforcement is the indispensible institution of the modern state, the fulcrum of authoritarianism in our society. The honest anarchist intuitively recognizes this, but may not realize that any future stateless society with a professional police class will inevitably end up as bad or worse. When it comes to anarchism, you cannot alienate your agency to personally produce the society you wish to participate in.
The only alternative to hierarchy, authority, and privilege is to reclaim our inalienable duty to be the police ourselves, to be members of a horizontal community, to be the exemplars of the values we claim to hold dear, and to face danger and suffering squarely. Anything less is nothing but an amusement park, a simulcrum of community that sells us tickets to a cage. That kind of farce has nothing to do with the anarchist project, which concerns humans and the communities that emerge from their congress.
]]>To describe this line of reasoning as selective would be a gross understatement. After all, let’s assume that labor unions are as evil as the RTW lobby says they are. Even granting that for the sake of argument, labor is not the only interest engaging in collective bargaining. What about the individuals involved in the employing corporation? Aren’t these businesses effectively “capital unions” exploiting incorporation laws to achieve a better bargaining position relative to labor? Isn’t the reason why investors pool their resources and form businesses to get better deals in the market through economies of scale? Isn’t that why they try to get investors rather than simply borrowing all the money for their start-up costs–to spread the risk and the reward?
So unions of labor are only one side of this story; to emphasize collusion on the workers’ side is to leave another form of collusion totally unaddressed. Corporations are capital unions, organizations whose members work together to negotiate wages and benefits (and other costs, of course) downwards to get the best return for themselves. Why is one form of collusion wrong and the other not?
I’d add that, in historical comparison to labor unions, corporations are much more fully creatures of the state. While labor unions have existed for much of their history in legally unrecognized forms, arising from the spontaneous organizing efforts of workers themselves, government-granted incorporation has always been a necessarily statist activity. There’s nothing free market about dictating to the market that corporations must be dealt with on their own, special terms. Conferring limited liability, entity status, and other privileges on corporations is intervention to skew the market, a crime that can only be laid at the feet of the state and the capitalists that run it.
I view this RTW movement as not only the argument that capital gets to deal with labor in a privileged manner, but also a defense of the entire balance of power between employers and employees. It’s about more than just authoritarianism and a system that favors capital over labor; it’s also about the legal codification of class distinctions inherent in the structure of production. To the extent capitalists decry so-called “class warfare,” I believe they are trying to gloss over the privileged terms on which they want to do business, allowing them to claim there are no classes of consequence while entrenching them further. That allows them to safely defer to the market, while ensuring it always delivers the balance of power they desire.
After all, if RTW folks truly believe that each and every worker deserves the right to negotiate individually with the capital union, why stop there? Why not also grant each and every shareholder, investor, creditor, and other owner of the corporate capital union the right to negotiate individually with the worker himself or his labor union? Why should both the worker and the owner be forced to deal with the extractive, exploitative management class as the exclusive agent of the corporation? If it’s unfair for the labor union to monopolize labor relative to a given employer, isn’t it equally unfair for the capital union to monopolize capital relative to a given employee?
The reason is that capital unions are politically and legally favored in labor negotiations, because they have always been favored. Our entire political economy is built around doing business on their terms. If you want a genuinely free market in labor, you can start by ridding yourself of the biased narratives that explain how collective barganing is virtuous and crucial for those with money, but unnecessary and evil for those who don’t.
]]>What gets me is that the site is called “Bleeding Heart Libertarians”. Ostensibly, the goal of the blog is to defend libertarianism as a compassionate philosophy. It adds insult to injury for libertarians to make the same tired arguments not only in a flashy new medium but also on a site intended to represent a compassionate, concerned variety of the philosophy whose label we both employ.
It’s not that his arguments are wrong per se. Yes, sweatshop jobs are the best of a crappy set of options for far too many people in the third world. Yes, shutting down those sweatshops without doing anything else would not improve anybody’s situation. And yes, I can’t contest the point that people should do things to help their situation, even if they don’t remedy it completely.
There are counterarguments that can and have been made, but I don’t want to focus on that. Zwolinski’s arguments don’t fail to convince because they are wrong; they fail but because they betray such a narrow vision. Instead of demonstrating the creative, liberatory aspects of our philosophy, such arguments encourage disadvantaged people to accept a crappy situation while telling ourselves that letting people be exploited is somehow good for them.
For example, I can vaguely imagine my situation becoming so desperate that I might agree to sell my organs, or prostitute myself for drugs, or any number of wretched things. Those activities might be my best available options if I’m sufficiently depressed or constrained by circumstances. And I would want a libertarian to defend me against a state that would throw me in jail over some of that behavior.
However, that would not be the kind of help I’d be most urgently seeking. I would not want somebody to justify those options as “good” for me – I’d be looking for somebody to help expand my available options to include better ones, so I don’t have to make such utterly shitty choices in the first place. A libertarian who extolled my “freedom to sleep under bridges” wouldn’t seem like much of an advocate to me – he would seem like somebody trying to alleviate his own conscience.
This is the myopia that plagues our movement; we have too often become apologists for the system instead of its opponents. Perhaps sweatshops are the best in a set of bad options. But if that’s the case, why are talented, “bleeding heart” academics like Zwolinski expending so much precious time, energy, and money on justifying that situation? Why not invest that time, energy, and money into advocating for an improvement in the set of choices they have, so that they have better options that are not demeaning, dangerous, and unjust? Why is libertarianism being construed in a manner that props up what Zwolinski admits is unjust, rather than taking the revolutionary step of abolishing the system of injustice?
People often ask why we add the “left” qualifier to our political label. Why not just identify as “libertarian” and be done with it? Now you know: because while the principles might be the same, the vision of flourishing is of a totally different scope and scale. Without a concept of mutual aid, solidarity, and common struggle against an oppressive system, libertarianism is no more than a way to whitewash privilege and sweep injustice under the rug of “free choice”. It’s not enough to defend a hollow freedom, because people need more than that. We can help each other achieve more than just freely choosing the best in a set of options the powerful and wealthy provide us.
I can accept all of Zwolinski’s arguments as correct insofar as they go. It’s just that they don’t go very far, because they betray a set of priorities that are not very compassionate, concerned, or worthwhile.
]]>The Mises Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker recently wrote a post entitled Fast Food Is Beautiful. I know. Here’s Tucker’s definition of beauty as excerpted from the Bloomberg article he was writing about:
Every Taco Bell, McDonald’s (MCD), Wendy’s (WEN), and Burger King is a little factory, with a manager who oversees three dozen workers, devises schedules and shifts, keeps track of inventory and the supply chain, supervises an assembly line churning out a quality-controlled, high-volume product, and takes in revenue of $1 million to $3 million a year, all with customers who show up at the front end of the factory at all hours of the day to buy the product.
Yup, right up there with truth, symmetry, sublimity, and sunsets, for sure.
Read the whole Bloomberg article; it certainly is a nice primer on the experience of the Taylorist fast food industry. It’s author is not quite as worshipful as Mr. Tucker, alluding to the problems he has learning the machine-like, precise routines at first. In many ways, it’s hard to read his descriptions of such an intense shop floor in a positive light. The whole environment seems so mindless and soul-crushing. Clearly, these businesses really squeeze the $8.50 an hour out of the staff, no matter what else you want to say in favor of the business model. I’ll note that the only hints of the inhumanity inherent in fast food were his personal experiences of actually working there.
In fact, it is only the desirability of working at these establishments that escapes Mr. Tucker’s breathless list of fast food’s heroic virtues (not an atypical Misesian oversight). It’s difficult to imagine a more stark rejection of aesthetics than my feelings about Mr. Tucker’s post. Just about everything that he values and sees as a miracle on Earth, I regard as a maladaptation to a ueber-corporatized, homogenized market. I find “customer service”, “efficiency” and “convenience” to be rather shallow measures of human happiness, no matter how many superlatives Misesians want to assign them.
To put it bluntly: I object to the factorization of food. I find everything about the culture of fast food distasteful: the insipid, childish, pandering marketing with which it assaults my eyes and ears; the gleamingly clean logos juxtaposed with grimy floors, bored staff, and greasy smells; the way every one looks the same, even if they’re different franchises; the sense of being in a plastic bubble eating fake food. I absolutely loathe the politics inherent in these “factories”: the scientific managerialist dictation of the precisely engineered ways to scoop meat or greet customers; the vapid euphemisms employed to dress up direct terms like “employee” (which becomes “champion”) and “scoop” (which becomes the “Beef Portioning Tool”); the behavioral conditioning and deskilling inherent in assembly lines; the disadvantaged workers used as replaceable parts by similarly replaceable but slightly less disadvantaged managers; the exploitation of artificially cheap infrastructure to grow to cancerous scales; all the influence and privilege attained from regulatory capture, political maneuvering, and other non-market goodies. When I reflect on the degree of dysfunction in fast food, I tend to identify Taco Bell’s key features as responses to a world gone horribly wrong in at least a few important ways.
What bugs me more than anything else about these factory food outlets is the mirror they hold up to our society. The factorization of food production only makes sense in a regimented, less-than-spontaneously organized society where the population is so effectively mobilized according to industry’s needs that free time is minimized, going so far as to cut into core activities of life. Eating, traditionally a time of rest and respite (if not enjoyment and fellowship), is turned into something more akin to a dose of product, to be minimized as a cost, not maximized as a virtue. The rational delivery of dirt cheap product scientifically designed to be consumed as quickly and unthinkingly as possible has more to do with the corporate establishment’s tastes and priorities than our own. For the industry, food is a uniform processed platform for flavors, fat, salt, and sugar according to brand guidelines, and nothing more. The banality reflected in this dystopia stretches far beyond fast food, defining the progressive project of efficient resource utilization, not human happiness. Whatever progress means in other industries, in fast food it signifies a drive to improve the experience and the brand, not the food; to excel at entertaining customers, not feeding them.
Now, with all of that off my chest, I’ll gladly admit that much of what I’m saying is at least a little snobby. I can afford to cook meals and shop at places with high quality fresh produce. I was raised to appreciate good nutrition. I’ve educated myself about the problems of fast food. Not everybody is as lucky as I am. And, personally, I just am grossed out by the whole concept (I can hear the cries of “then don’t eat there!” already).
If Mr. Tucker’s over the top praise of fast food factories reflected concerns and values peculiar to his approach and personal tastes, then my withering attack was just as particular and subjective. I can readily see why people would find my sense of taste, my high standards for eating, my disgust at the relationships inherent in the factory food setting to be unconvincing. That would lead them to read the above rant about fast food in an unfavorable and dismissive light, just as surely as Mr. Tucker’s views strike me as absurd and deeply distorted.
Broadly speaking, Mr. Tucker and I probably hold more values in common than not. If pressed for a quick explanation of the kind of society we’re working towards, the political prerequisites Mr. Tucker would list as crucial to a libertarian society would be roughly analogous to those I’d recite. However, I imagine few libertarians are working towards some vague, unspecified future society where the only thing that matters is the abstract recognition of the non-aggression principle. No, we have hopes and dreams we want to fulfill. We’re working towards a society in which we can fully express ourselves and live according to the values we hold dear and with which we identify. The liberty we seek is not just intrinsically rewarding; it is functional, a means towards our own goals and self-actualization that have nothing to do with politics.
What bothers me about commerce-ueber-alles libertarians like Mr. Tucker is that they really believe it. Many seem to genuinely look forward to the sort of sterile, superficial, rationalized corporate world satirized in the film “Idiocracy”. To apply the adjective “beautiful” (or “ugly”) to fast food is to betray a basic, irrational attachment that precedes any counterarguments about corporatism and consumerism. It means that they would promote this corporate aesthetic even if it didn’t come with a hefty side of statist intervention and privilege. So from their point of view it makes no sense to belabor the link between fast food and corporatism; the world they’re working towards freely organizes into franchise chains and little factories for everything. People just fall into boss and employee roles (perhaps they would prefer to call those roles “Command Facilitator” and “Obedience Hero”).
This taste for the culture of large scale commerce is likely involved in their promotion of corporations as extra- or anti-statist institutions. These are the people who argue that even without statist incorporation and other privileges, people would voluntarily and spontaneously give a crap that I’m calling myself a corporation. I don’t find the argument convincing, but it’s clear that their embrace of the values of corporate organization are a motivating force, above and beyond the Austro-libertarian economic and political principles involved.
Indeed, as I’ve argued before, political beliefs and philosophical principles ultimately rest on the innate personalities, particular lives, and subjective opinions that people bring to the table. People adopt values for reasons that are not entirely clear, and then reason to positions, actions, and words they articulate in society as a reflection of the values. Given that ideologies like libertarianism function as incomplete models of the world, their adoption is almost certainly motivated by irrational values that are assumed prior to any rational inquiry. We all have these arbitrary blind spots that any incomplete, particularist experience will create.
It all reminds me of the arguments people made to me about working with national anarchists. These national anarchists, the arguments go, might be willing to work with leftists and libertarians to overthrow the state and abolish capitalism. But they hold values that impel them to replace the status quo with exclusionary, discriminatory, unenlightened institutions that run counter to values I want to see thrive. Our visions of what we’re working towards are opposed, so in what sense are we really on the same team? Because we share an enemy at present?
It seems we all bring a mix of ideations, principles, and opinions to the table whenever we set out to influence our world and neighbors. We all have our idiosyncrasies, our unexamined habits of thought, those painful memories or singular realizations that forever color our thinking. All these matters influence our politics, and they influence the manner of our belief as well as the content. These preferences are innately bound up in our sense of identity, and to that extent, they represent to some degree our wish to impose that identity on the world and on each other. Butler Shaffer talks about this in “Calculated Chaos” (which I reviewed here) as the expansion of “ego boundaries”, and from the conflagrations I’ve witnessed between disagreeing libertarians, it seems as apt a characterization as any.
So when allies happen upon differences in taste that are constitutive of their ideological motivations, it’s vital that they tread lightly - at least, if accomplishing change is more important than being right. This is what Ayn Rand got horribly wrong: her elevation of tastes into moral absolutes obscured the scope of diversity inherent in the liberationist project. We are in a very human endeavor here: we will offend each other, we will make mistakes of all sorts, we will let ourselves down. But in the end, if we’re not in this game to learn about ourselves and others, if we’re not open to that transcendental truth that has been hidden by millennia of convention and oppression, we’re in this for what I’d argue are the wrong reasons.
Above all, we must recognize the blind spots our own subjective experiences generate. Is it acceptable for Mr. Tucker to dismiss the reality of corporatist privilege inherent in fast food, just because fast food happens to exemplify some features he admires? Of course not - no more than it is acceptable for statists to dismiss the reality of government failure just because they prefer schooling to be uniform, disciplined, and universally accessible to all Americans. The challenge should not be to defend the grey area, but to articulate the white and black that much more vividly to better understand what’s going on and hopefully improve on it. The alternative is for our struggle to descend into a form of shallow identity politics where we use arguments to advance our personal egos and preferences. Too much of that is going on already.
Rigid adherence to one’s tastes and opinions does not simply make apologists out of us; it stunts our imagination and the scope of possibilities we’ll accept as we become freer. This is dangerous because one of the reasons to advocate for liberty is to open up those new vistas and creative approaches that we can’t possibly anticipate in our current context. The more we can remain open to revolutionary ideas that can transcend our problems, the more we understand our values for what they are: decisions, not boundaries. Conversely, the more we believe that freedom looks like Taco Bell per se, or looks like the Wobblies per se, the more we arrest the very impulse we seek to unleash. It is in liberty that the inspiration to discover our true selves underneath our personalities becomes more probable. To take responsibility for your values and opinions is a radical step, but we must take it if we are not to be unwittingly ruled by affectations and reflexes.
On the Left, we understand that privilege is not an individual moral failing or episodic crime but rather a systemic feature of our society. To point out an instance of privilege is not necessarily a condemnation of the beneficiary, let alone “scrupulosity”. But when your motivating value is the lionization of commerce qua commerce, then reminders about its collusion with the state are probably a bit of a buzzkill.
However, libertarianism is not about getting high on self-righteousness. And the personal umbrage Mr. Tucker takes to the facts of fast food clearly indicates that this is about more than political principles. That’s ok: it has always been about more than political principles for all of us. The more we recognize our subjective preferences and take responsibility for them, the more clearly we can articulate principles and realize our visions while not denying their weaknesses. More importantly, we’ll start to understand ourselves and the human condition more clearly. Elevating personal taste to political absolute is ignorant and superficial, but it’s an ignorance and superficiality we’re all working on.
]]>Murray Rothbard used the phrase “do you hate the state?” to ferret out real from mild libertarians. As a correlative question, we might ask “do you love commerce?” to ferret out real defenders of real markets as versus those who just enjoy standing in moral judgement over the whole world as it really exists. Yes, I too am against corn subsides, and against all subsidies, as well as taxes, regulations, inflation, zoning, public roads and everything else. In a free market, everything would thrive even more than it does today, and that goes for fast food too.
I have some responses.
People who basically want the status quo with less taxes and regulation (or less armies and corporations) might be allies in the fight against the state. But they’re hardly the kind of radicals that matter - the creative, exploratory radicals who stretch the limits of human potential, inspiration and self-actualization. That’s not a strictly political or economic category, but for God’s sake: there’s more to life than politics or economics. If markets and commerce - or any subset of the human condition - are more important to you than genuine freedom, then you’re missing an entire spectrum of the glorious mystery of life on this planet.
]]>It is not natural, however, to fit tragedy into an ideological narrative. Ideology doesn’t originate within us but arises from our acceptance of a narrow system of thought to which we attempt to conform. So complex events and nuanced actions must be shoved like a square peg into a round hole in order to validate the black and white ideological approach in our gray shaded lives. But we adopt ideological approaches for similar reasons: to give ourselves a sense that we can explain it all, that if we can just achieve the world prescribed by the ideology, such tragedy will never occur again.
The attack on Representative Giffords is now being portrayed by many as an outgrowth of the “climate of hate” surrounding conservative politics in general and the Tea Party movement in particular. The assassin would never have attacked this congresswoman, many claim, if there wasn’t a poisonous undercurrent of anti-government sentiment. While an individual is responsible for his or her actions, we have a responsibility also to preserve a civil discourse and ensure that loose cannons do not employ our rhetoric in the service of violence.
Insofar as this goes, I have no problem with the argument above. We should take responsibility for the climate our politics creates, because that climate is the reality behind the abstractions of politics, civil society, and other institutions we ostensibly critique and support. The less positive and constructive our participation in the network of society, the more we create the hell we claim to seek to avoid. We each have an unenforceable but important duty to be our best selves in all matters.
However, this duty is only part of the story. Yes, we the people are accountable for our participation in the body politic. And if people are angry, then that is a problem - but a problem for all of us. After all, people don’t just get upset for no reason. It is usually the persistent denial of their interests, their values, the legitimacy of their point of view that creates the frustration and cynicism leading to such lashing out, rhetorically or physically.
Conservatives and liberals are jumping on the Giffords attack to push it into or out of their ideological narratives. They either blame those who stand against government overreach, or they deny that resistance to government overreach is to blame. What neither side does is question the premises of this argument: that only one side is responsible for this.
It seems to me that the growing conservative backlash to intrusive government has contributed to the climate of hate. But then, by the same token, so has the intrusive government acts that created the backlash. For that matter, the attitude with which certain statists have demonized and marginalized anti-statists also fed the feelings of hate and resentment. If there is a climate of hate, then all of us are responsible - not just the party that breaks first from these conditions.
Those who support the establishment - government functionaries, liberals sometimes, conservatives other times - act as if state actions are automatically legitimate, and that anybody who disagrees is a crank. Why isn’t this dismissive attitude not just as responsible for the eventual violence as the resentful attitude? If civility is the order of the day, it cannot be defined merely as fitting within the narrow confines of “accepted thinking”. And so extremism and hate are singled out as the problems, rather than the symptoms.
If we are to heal these divides and build a society based on some modicum of trust and appreciation, a society that can solve problems in the name of all its members and not to benefit some members over others, we have to take a step back from what we’ve been doing all this time and think freshly and honestly. It is incumbent on all of us - not just the side with which we disagree - to end the climate of hate. But ending that climate means addressing the causes, not the individual straw that breaks the camel’s back. And that likely means a stiff challenge to the centrist, establishmentarian elites who benefit no matter which side of the debate is labelled “extremist”.
]]>At the time, Allies were debating the proper reaction to an inflammatory essay that had been written by a non-left libertarian. This debate turned into a crisis: one left libertarian denouncing the other as out of bounds and beyond the pale. As all parties stood their ground, things digressed into nasty insults and accusations that mainly exhausted us. It got to be surprisingly ridiculous, but what surprised me the most was the fact that, of all people, Wilbur - the one who likely understands the historic trajectory of this movement more than anybody else, and therefore would have the most to say about where all this is headed - was the one to leave.
Among Wilbur’s arguments, as I understand them, was the absence of any way to resolve the dispute to everybody’s satisfaction. The Alliance had always been a vague and inarticulable one, grounded in shared tendencies but no shared principles that had ever been made clear, let alone binding. Add to that the concept of ALL being a place where “we all agree to disagree” and you have the basis for neither ideological commitment nor ideological boundaries. Personal attacks were all anybody had, because there was no shared premise of alliance, and I imagine Wilbur couldn’t see the point of continuing to associate with such a meaningless brand. If all we were going to do was be an online club of likeminded malcontents, why bother winning this fight?
Fast forward to earlier this year: the Center for a Stateless Society had been building momentum with a new funding model and a solid record of publishing op-eds for a year or so. However, Wilbur left the advisory board because he was increasingly uncomfortable with the term “market anarchist” as a description of his beliefs. Read his blog and you’ll feel a yearning expressed over and over: to get beyond the ideological factions and locate the common principle that impels us to use fancy terms like “individualism” and “market”. Where C4SS offered a brand, Wilbur sought substance.
It appears the same concerns that led to Wilbur’s departure from the Alliance contributed to his departure from the Center. In the comments for a recent C4SS op-ed that caused many of us discomfort, Wilbur persistently argued not just against the article but against the nebulous constellation of ideas and tendencies that comprise the Center’s mission:
I’ve gradually distanced myself from left-libertarianism, market anarchism, the ALLiance and the Center, largely because the sorts of “agreement” that seem most common look more like disagreement to me – and because they seem to open the door more often to those who elevate “private property” over individual liberty (despite their rhetoric) much more often than they admit those whose concern for individual liberty makes them resistant to “private property.” I’m not being stubborn about disagreement. The ALLiance was initially built around a certain amount of active disagreement. The notion that we “really agree” really just seems dismissive to me, given the obvious gulf between our positions.
Now, I’ve been an enthusiastic supporter of the Center for a year or so. It is not everyday that you get a chance to push op-eds promoting anarchism to mainstream media sources. Given the people involved in the project - Brad Spangler, Gary Chartier, Kevin Carson, Darian Worden - I felt like the left libertarian credentials of this organization needed no vetting whatsoever. The biggest motivator for me was being able to support those writers whom I appreciate and whom I think are as potentially convincing to others as one was to me. Kevin Carson is probably the reason I ever considered anarchism in the first place.
However, I do have reservations. For one, I do not consider myself a “market anarchist”, for many of the reasons Wilbur articulates. For another thing, the Center has a tendency to extend its language beyond what I would consider the left libertarian consensus into narrow agorist or market fundamentalist language, where all we seek to advocate is expressed in pure economic terms. I don’t want to single out specific articles or authors; it suffices to say that these misgivings are shared by more than a couple of supporters, so it’s not just me.
In fact I don’t think it’s the authors’ fault - they do what they can to further the work of the Center as they understand it, and none of them understand it any worse than the rest of us. Without a clear consensus on the Center’s mission, why shouldn’t they just write about whatever they feel like? The problem is not their understanding of the C4SS consensus so much as ours.
What vision and principles do we share? When we support the Center, what are we saying with that support? How do we judge the efficacy of the Center when there’s no clear statement of the advocated “stateless society”? Why stop at “market anarchism” as the only articulation of statelessness - why not be more ecumenical towards the variety in the anarchist movement?
All of the articles that bother me are perfectly consonant with market anarchism, broadly constructed. We can say, “So what? We disagree on certain points. Big deal.” But I don’t consider that a sustainable situation, any more than it was in the Alliance. It’s even more urgent because the Center is not merely a debate club, affinity group, or online brand; it’s an outreach organization designed to generate real results: new anarchists. What is at stake here is bigger than competing visions and ideological formulations of market anarchism; this agitprop will influence future left libertarians and market anarchists who will expand upon our work for years to come. Little in our corner of the universe could demand more accountability.
Until we take the difficult leap towards defining the positive goals, values, and dreams that unite us, as well as the outcomes we mutually reject as unacceptable even in a stateless society, it will be difficult for people to feel they understand exactly what they are funding. Every time a member reads an article that strays from their personal vision, they will question the Center’s mission. The Center’s success cannot be judged by its supporters if there is no sense of our common approach and aspirations, or at least an understanding of the contested areas that are likely to divide us. Remember: this is not about all of us agreeing so much as all of us deciding how to package and sell this “market anarchism” to which we all supposedly adhere (and yes, that alone gives me pause).
I don’t know how to go about organizing the discussion that would articulate or ratify such a consensus. But if this Center for a Stateless Society is going to advocate for us, especially when capably and admirably run by such steadfast organizers and generous writers on a shoestring budget, the least we can do is give them guidance and not just criticism. Wilbur’s departure was an indication that we cannot simply rally around a black flag; revolutionary consensus requires us to be honest about the change we seek, and to ally on the basis of that honesty. It might be painful, but if we could find such a consensus that all sides of the market anarchist / left libertarian milieu could get behind, we would have the basis for a powerful advocacy and outreach group, indeed.
]]>My interest today has more to do with Amazon.com’s booting of Wikileaks from their web services hosting. The Amazon Web Services statement explains the supposed motivations are not the result of Joe Lieberman’s bullying - the tone suggesting outrage that anybody would dare think Amazon.com would cave to such pressure. Instead, they provide two reasons for their decision:
Wikileaks’ supposed violation of their terms of service because they do not own the content they are publishing (even though the public pays for it)
the danger the unredacted material poses to certain individuals around the world (even though Wikileaks reached out to the government for help in identifying names to redact in the past and was rebuffed).
It’s merely a coincidence that Amazon found all these reasons to kick Wikileaks off their services right around the time it became politically convenient to do so. Also, pay no attention to the fact that another company providing software to Wikileaks pulled their support - only they acknowledged the role of government pressure. No smell there at all.
I expect a corporation to act in a spineless manner without regard to the larger issues of justice and accountability. After all, they are not designed to take any other matters into consideration but maximization of profits for shareholders. This makes them perfect collaborators in the conspiracy that is the state. However, what I find extremely grating is the way some libertarians trot out all manner of excuses to justify it. For example, there’s this post from Lew Rockwell that deifies the market as beyond reproach:
Back in my days in the conservative movement, I was always urged to boycott goods from communist countries. I never did. I don’t like boycotts. Commerce is a blessing. We need more of it.
You’re entitled to your own opinion - please read the rest of the post - but I find this position absolutely bizarre. Ostensibly, the colonists’ boycott of the East India Trading Company was a huge mistake; we should have resisted their monopoly by flooding them with money, I suppose! A boycott is not some extra-market construct that works against commerce; a boycott is a form of market activity. In order for a market to be free, it has to be just as valid to abstain from a purchase as it is to make it. Equally so, it has to be just as valid to coordinate demand among consenting parties (i.e. a boycott) as it is to coordinate the production of supply among willing business partners (i.e. a firm).
But Rockwell’s position goes beyond this, and it’s illustrative of a trend among libertarians to deify the market and turn it into something above and beyond the constituent people - a kind of disembodied platonic force for good that bends us to its will. The idea that any commerce whatsoever is a “blessing” elevates market economics to an unimpeachable position. The criterion ceases to be the free nature of this market, or that market’s meeting the needs of its individual participants - simply the fact that it’s called a market is enough to exempt it from scrutiny. Might as well call the market “God” and start praying for its blessings if we’re going to be that absolutist and irrational.
In fact, markets are not supernatural beings; they are a tool, a social construct people employ to efficiently allocate goods and services. As such, they operate within the constraints of a social context. But as wonderful they can be, there’s nothing inherently good, just, or laudable about markets qua markets. They can mediate supply and demand, but they can’t speak to what we ought to supply or demand. All kinds of examples of markets allocating goods and services of questionable validity can be found throughout history and in the present day.
What about the age-old markets for slaves? What about markets in endangered animals, or hitman services, or for that matter political influence? What about competitive bidding for cushy government contracts? What about the sale of tax collection privileges? These are all examples of markets doing their job: distributing information about supply and demand to consumers and producers within a given market, however desirable or moral. The fact that they involve various levels of thuggery and fraud doesn’t change their utility to those participating in them.
Of course, one could claim these markets are not free - that they violate rights in some way, and therefore they shouldn’t be treated the same as free markets. But my point is not to dictate the rules by which libertarians should accept or reject given markets. Simply understand that raw supply and demand, divorced from the social context, is no moral imperative, and particular rights are not necessarily required for commerce to function.
It suffices to say that we need more than merely efficient price signals to producers and consumers; a social context for justice and values. Of course, normally libertarianism has indeed been understood in terms more fundamental than its economic implications in isolation from other concerns. These fundamental terms provide guidance on the social context that can inform the execution of market economics in ways that promote human flourishing.
In order for markets to emerge that can reflect the values we cherish, we must articulate and enforce those values by not accepting the perversion of our markets by illegitimate actors by violent criminals such as the state. One of these perversions, I’d argue, is the corporate form, which grants privileges to certain legally recognized aggregations of capital and manpower. As legally chartered, these corporations must pursue the maximization of shareholder profit as their number one priority - other concerns, such as social justice, environmental quality, community health, etc. must be subordinated to sheer accumulation. It is a recipe for our current pragmatic political economy where we convince ourselves there is a realm of business that can be isolated from the imminently human struggle for peace and justice.
A great example of this artificial demarcation of amoral business territory is Stephan Kinsella’s assent to Rockwell’s post. Kinsella is a frequent defender of the corporate form so his position here does not surprise me. But his argument on Amazon’s victim status here only carries weight if you assume that the rules governing Amazon’s corporate behavior are valid rules in the first place:
Amazon’s managers have an obligation to the shareholders; they have no right to risk or waste shareholder money for political grandstanding. It’s not their money they would be risking. I also think that in addition to the anti-war libertarian activists who are up in arms about Amazon’s pursuit of profits instead of activism, a number of left-libertarians are using this as an excuse to pile on Amazon because it’s big, a corporation, and profitable.
Of course it’s not the management’s money with which to take moral stances as they please. But that’s kind of the point: the creation of huge economic bases in our society having no values to defend except endless accumulation is the reason for the spineless pragmatism evinced by Amazon’s decision. You could not concoct a more clever way to ensure that the economic engines of the country maintain allegiance and subservience to an agenda than by chartering these organization in such a narrow manner. Give them privileges like limited liability, personhood status, special tax rules, regulations that prevent entry by smaller competitors, etc. and they will keep their nose out of Daddy Government’s dirty business. There may be a different kind of capitalism possible, but we haven’t seen it yet.
Kinsella does argue that taxpayers do the same thing: by supporting the government’s crimes with our money, aren’t we complicit? That may be true, but at least in our case we are flesh and blood, rational, responsible human beings - not legally constructed and constrained, artificial systems designed for a single economic purpose. We can weigh moral matters, make compromises, and consider deeply our actions. We can be appealed to as moral actors, even if we don’t always exercise our responsibility to do so. Contrast this capacity for conscience with the corporate prerogative to subordinate the many nuanced concerns a healthy human society must address to the bottom line. Such an impersonal system could not assume duties unable to be accounted for in a ledger book even if it wanted to.
Also consider that this isn’t the first time that corporations have assisted the U.S. government in nefarious deeds, claiming to be victims powerless to resist their pressure. Remember all the telecom companies who helped the government secretly eavesdrop on Americans’ conversations? Is there some important difference between corporate behavior in these two cases? I’m not suggesting that spying on Americans is exactly the same as stifling Americans’ access to information necessary to hold their government accountable for serious wrongdoing. But in both cases, the familiar defense of “protect the shareholders at all costs” leads these government-created artificial constructs to take actions devoid of conscience. Again, humans do not always follow their conscience, but at least we have one - we have the potential to do the right thing, unlike corporations.
Furthermore, the pragmatic, “it’s just business” political economy that emerges from this corporate consensus encourages apathy and inattention to deep political issues on the part of individuals, who are impelled instead into a safe, comfortable, and distracting consumerism. It’s precisely because this economy is rigged to artificially benefit capital at the expense of working people that we are inclined to ignore far-off foreign policy matters as unimportant and accept mainstream, government-friendly constructions of political issues (which organizations like Wikileaks are barely able to challenge). The more we accept the premises of this system, the more it traps us in a sense of powerlessness. The key is to question these premises by rejecting corporatism as any sort of acceptable excuse to duck these tough political and moral realities, and to demand in the meantime that the humans running these government-chartered and -privileged fictions serve our interests rather than the government’s. Boycotts are one way to hit corporations where they can be hurt: the bottom line that provides the basis for their entire existence.
In the end, Amazon.com did the right thing for their shareholders. That’s the problem; a society composed of large, artificial actors pledged to serve narrowly defined interests divorced from the wider health of the human condition cannot build the kinds of markets that reinforce free and prosperous societies. Libertarians should concern themselves first and foremost with the pursuit of freedom and justice, with markets being a natural outgrowth of these core values. To do otherwise, as many market fundamentalists do, not only puts the cart before the horse; it strengthens our enemies and weakens the civil society for which we advocate.
]]>Caplan argues over and over in his article that certain left libertarian arguments do not make sense because, if you consider the issues from an economic point of view, everything balances out. In doing so, he glosses over a key difference between his approach and that of left libertarians generally; many of us find the typical libertarian reduction of all matters of justice, culture, etc. to economic calculation totally warped and inaccurate. More and more of us are rejecting a rigid market fundamentalism that seems to discount any issue that cannot be modeled economically. There’s more to human flourishing than marginal value.
For example, Caplan may be right that we effectively forego a fairer rental agreement with our landlord in exchange for lower rents. It’s certainly an elegant argument that provides a clean explanation for our entrance into supposedly free contracts with such little negotiating wiggle room for ourselves. Of course, for economists, it’s all about explaining within the constraints of the model - there’s no price one can place on human dignity, the social effects of systemically lopsided contracts, etc. A pure economic argument does not address whether justice is served, or why people place such a low priority on being treated fairly. It doesn’t attempt to back up the speculation on people’s motives for accepting skewed contracts with evidence; the mere assertion that our market system has mediated this contract is proof positive that it is fair and balanced, and so the only task left is to come up with explanations for why we chose such an arrangement.
As Kevin Carson always says, you can’t on the one hand agree with left libertarians that we do not have a free market and, on the other hand, defend institutions and economic arrangements in our present society on free market grounds without at least a bit more explanation than “revealed preference, so suck it”. But even beyond that, I’m not willing to say that a condition that can be modeled in a theoretic, genuine free market is necessarily desirable for that reason alone. Markets are just one tool in society’s belt, and those concerned with a voluntary, fair, sane world are somewhat naive if they think the struggle for justice and dignity has to be accounted for in a ledger book because, otherwise, it’s not worth pursuing.
]]>There are two key elements to the court’s conclusion: the constitutional prohibition of free speech restrictions and the status of the corporation as a person. Libertarians should not complain about the court’s conclusions with respect to the first element. The government must abstain from interfering with any person’s political contributions, monetary or polemical.
In the past the court has seen fit to abridge first amendment rights in cases where the government has a compelling interest. Campaign finance laws have usually rested on this basis, relying on the court’s acknowledgement of the need for balancing a variety of interests. In throwing out McCain-Feingold, the Supreme Court can be seen as effectively reining in these deviations from the letter of the law. A strictly defined freedom of speech should certainly be defended.
But as Glenn Greenwald notes in his excellent commentary on the issue, the justices approached the case solely from the perspective of first amendment applicability and scope. No justice, dissenting or otherwise, objected to the premise that corporations are persons with constitutional protections. The focus remained fixed on narrow questions of money as a form of free speech as well as the proper applicability of free speech to the corporate campaign contributions. The nature of the activity was examined; the nature of the actor, neglected.
The real issue here is not whether corporations should be involved in the political process. It’s also not whether they should have first amendment protections. Regarding monetary contributions from anybody to any candidate for public office as free speech is entirely beside the point. The most important and pressing matter is whether these artificial persons called corporations can speak; whether legal fictions can spend money. It’s whether the Constitution protects what doesn’t actually exist.
The court simply let stand the fantastic notion that an abstraction composed of contracts and assets, a figment that can do or say nothing without human beings doing for it, can engage in anything qua a corporation. As such, an opportunity to overturn a century of erroneous precedent was squandered. Once again, in spite of an improvement in the consistency of its approach to the narrow free speech issue, the court preserved a much more fundamental complexity. The ruling and dissent reflect a labored reasoning stemming from unquestioned premises.
What do we mean when we say a corporation can donate money to campaigns freely? Do we mean that its officers do so on behalf of the shareholders or partners? If so, can’t we talk about free speech in terms of those individuals’ rights and responsibilities? Do we mean that this agreement between stakeholders has some sort of capacity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that justifies every other limit on governmental power? All these questions and more beg for a real legal analysis. They were ignored precisely because they expose an inconsistency, the underbelly of the elite consensus.
Corporate personhood necessitates muddled, sloppy balancing acts by the court. And in complicated rulings, the rich and powerful have the same legal upper hand they had when McCain-Feingold stood: they can afford the expenses required to make sense of the precedent and twist it in their own favor. To ask whether corporations even have free speech rights would be too profound and simple a question to preserve the advantage of the powers that be. We little folk might recognize what is at stake were the matter made so plain.
Of course we should not water down the first amendment just to punish corporations. What we should do is challenge the status of the corporation as a person. The majority’s impulse to streamline the interpretation of the first amendment is fine, but they passed on the real case.
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